Monday, May 02, 2016

Elizabeth May Points Out the Obvious

Canada is very popular at the UN these days. I think winning a seat on the Security Council in the next vote is looking like a sure thing. Trudeau’s speech was interrupted by applause more often than any other speaker in the General Assembly. His willingness to embrace basic principles of climate justice resonated as he explained Canada was committed to assisting developing countries ‘since they should not be punished for a problem they did not create’.

On the other hand, our target remains the one tabled last year by the previous government— 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. Yet, there has been a weak environmental movement response to this sad reality. I get it. After 10 years of Harper, the movement is grateful to have a new Liberal government that is in favour of climate action.

For months, mainstream media has been falsely reporting that Trudeau adopted that target in Paris. Internally, the bureaucracy is pressing the environment minister so hard that even the Harper target will be hard to reach.

The worrying line in Trudeau’s speech was that Canada ‘will meet or exceed our target’. That sounds really good, but it is the first time the Prime Minister has associated himself at all with the Harper target. To keep our commitment to avoiding 1.5ºC we need to make our target reflect doing our fair share in the world. And that one isn’t it. It cannot be ‘meet or exceed’. To keep our promises in Paris, it can only be ‘exceed’—and by a lot.

May goes on to note that we cannot hope to meet even Harper's targets if we permit the planned expansion of the Tar Sandsproduction or launch a new effort to export LNG.